American Eagle moved first, rolling out a Sydney Sweeney creative that hinged on a winking “great jeans/genes” double entendre. It was a celebrity-led provocation engineered for instant discourse: a simple visual, a polarizing line, and a star with cross-demographic reach. The effect was to turn a denim spot into a referendum on taste and tone, drawing the campaign into the broader culture-war slipstream and supercharging search and social chatter.
Gap arrived three and a half weeks later with “Better in Denim,” a high-tempo, choreography-first film starring KATSEYE and set to Kelis’s “Milkshake.” Where American Eagle flirted with controversy, Gap chased shareability. The spot revived the low-rise and Long & Lean silhouettes, wrapped the product story in Y2K nostalgia, and handed viewers a dance loop built to be copied. The casting garnered a global fandom; the soundtrack delivered a memorable hook; the styling made the looks feel both familiar and newly directional.
How Each Engineered Attention
The Sweeney creative is the classic heat-spike strategy: compress the message into a single talking point and let the internet argue on your behalf. It maximizes news value and drives people to Google and X, where speed of conversation is the currency. The risk is volatility. Attention built on provocation can inflate quickly, but it is harder to steer, easier to politicize, and more likely to frame the brand as the subject of a debate rather than the source of a mood.
Gap’s film took the opposite tack: broaden the surface area for participation. Music nostalgia evokes instant recognition, choreography inspires mimicry, and a global pop group facilitates distributed amplification. Instead of one debate, you get many remixes. Instead of a single quote, you get a thousand creator responses. The outcome is a larger pool of on-platform views and a steadier arc—less spiky in sentiment, more expansive in reach.
What the Numbers Say
According to Gap’s own early readout, the denim film gained tens of millions of views in a matter of days, ultimately reaching the hundreds of millions and accumulating billions of impressions, with search demand peaking on TikTok. Those are platform-native indicators of scale, the kind of metrics that reflect people actually watching the asset where it lives and then feeding it back into the algorithm through recreations and shares.
American Eagle, by contrast, produced a conversation shockwave. Brand mentions exploded from a sleepy baseline to tens of thousands daily, peaking well into six figures on X. Sentiment skewed more positive than many would expect for a controversy-adjacent moment, and Google search hit all-time highs. Yet, the early commercial picture was mixed: web traffic increased strongly year over year, while store visits and sell-through signals were less convincing in the initial period. In other words, the ad dominated headlines and timelines, but the quality of that attention was uneven.
Buzz, Brand Safety, and Business Intent
This is the nub of the “buzz” question. If buzz is defined as rhetorical volume—how loudly the culture talks about you—American Eagle can claim the microphone. If it’s defined by the size and durability of the audience actually consuming the work—how many people watch, rewatch, and recreate it—Gap’s choreography-led approach appears superior. The former excels at generating press and partisan takes; the latter excels at compounding reach inside the platforms where purchase journeys increasingly begin.
Brand strategy matters here. Gap is in the midst of a pop-culture repositioning, utilizing fashion-forward silhouettes under Zac Posen’s guidance while pursuing joyful, universal hooks that resonate globally without courting backlash. The dance-driven play aligns with that brief and reinforces the product story in motion. American Eagle, for its part, bet on a bolder, cheekier voice to punch above its weight in a crowded back-to-school window. The short-term noise delivered will depend on whether the conversation can be re-centered on jeans rather than jokes, ultimately impacting long-term loyalty.
The Verdict and What it Signals
On the narrow question of who “won the buzz war,” the answer turns on which currency you value. For on-platform viewing, shareable participation, and brand-safe virality at scale, Gap takes it. For news-cycle dominance, search spikes, and raw social mentions—even with the risk that comes with them—American Eagle generated the louder flash. The broader takeaway is more instructive than the scoreboard: the most valuable buzz today is the kind that audiences can do something with—learn the move, copy the look, join the loop. That’s the kind of attention that compounds, travels, and, crucially, converts.
